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But he does like Robo-Cop

From Jonah Campbell’s guest post about why the Terminator isn’t a cyborg, at Quiet Babylon:

Part of why I think cyborgs are interesting, why they are interesting to us, culturally, is how they play on our anxieties about the human, and about the unity/disruption of the human body. The biggest question on the mind of every cyborg and every person who is afraid of cyborgs is “how many augmentations before they’re no longer human?”

And then:

Now obviously the Terminator plays on some cultural anxieties (I mean it’s a robot skeleton, right?), but I don’t think these are the same anxieties, the same tensions. The Terminator comes from a long line of Creations Gone Awry/Don’t Play God/By Our Hubris Undone/Science Run Amok sort of tropes, of which killer robots are merely one strand. In their unstoppable robotic march we manifest our fear of being replaced by our technological creations, but there is something much more insidious about being”invaded by our technology, being compromised in our fundamental organicism.

Namely:

The cyborg, in its more dystopian moments, is an icon of body horror. Of course it is altogether different things in different lights ““ it is progress, it is the advent of the posthuman, it is testament to our capacity for adaptation, for expressing our mastery over or indifference to both Nature with a capital N and nature with a lower-case one…

Abler was run by Sara Hendren between 2009 and 2017. I tracked and commented on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas.

It was a time when discussions on the web weren't yet entirely dominated by social media, and it was an exciting moment to be blogging—putting together unlikely bedfellows next to one another, magazine-style, to see what sense could be made by thinking aloud, together. I was writing about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more. The ideas were associatively connected, restless with questions. And all of it, in retrospect, was a platform, a runway for me to write myself into a mode of working as a design researcher and artist.

You can see some of my current and ongoing projects—making, writing, speaking, and even, yes, still blogging—here.

I tweet. You can use this site by going straight to the archives for past posts, or you can use the guide here on the home page.